Editor's Note

The Charge

The house wanted me to return!

The Case

Not me, boy.

Now, I didn't see the 1999 version of House on Haunted Hill. I was
somehow able to resist the siren-song lure of seeing actors like Chris Kattan,
Peter Gallagher, and Famke Janssen sliced and smashed. As a child, however, I
was weaned on the Vincent Price original, so I have a reference point for this
remake.

At least, I thought I did. Like the 1999 remake of The Haunting—which determined haunted
houses, in and of themselves, aren't scary enough, and threw in some business
about child killing—the HHH remake upped the ante by setting
everything in a shuttered insane asylum with a terrible past.

In this sequel, a bunch of people end up back at the house/asylum looking
for the Baphomet Idol, which is some kind of valuable (and, we discover, evil)
effigy associated with the Knights Templar. No one is actually making a
Return to House on Haunted Hill, since the lone survivor of that little
foray blows her brains out right at the start of this film, and it's left to her
sister to battle the forces of darkness and generally act like an idiot.

Yes, act like an idiot. Now, I'm familiar with that whole horror-movie
theory, how if people didn't act like idiots, they'd use logic to survive and
there'd be no movie, but the group on display here ratchets up the idiot
quotient to uncomfortable levels. Camp Crystal Lake is a Mensa colony by
comparison.

These characters do unfathomable things before even setting foot in the
Asylum on Haunted Hill, including kidnapping the editor of an apparently
high-profile magazine because her sister might (or might not) have told her
something (or not). They kidnap her at gunpoint! With two muscle-bound,
ex-professional-wrestling goons! And a blank-faced-and-horny lesbian! When we
see this lineup of characters, we're not only tipped off as to who our first
three victims will be, but we're reassured that our lust for a bit of girl flesh
will be quenched by an encounter with the nubile dead.

Once at the house/asylum, we find there are basically two teams: the
mercenary baddies, led by Desmond (Erik Palladino, The Thirst), who are there to find the idol
(pronounced "bath mat" by the meatheads) and sell it for $5 million;
and the non-baddies, led by Dr. Richard Hammer (Steven Pacey, Blake's 7),
who's been searching for the blasted Baphomet for 20 years and thinks it belongs
in a museum. Except for the three goons, everyone has some kind of relationship
with everyone else, and if this were a movie in which character and plot
mattered, these relationships might lead to something.

But this movie is concerned with showing gruesome demises and lots of quick
cutting. Much of the action takes place in the basement of the asylum/house, so
everything has that bleak and nasty industrial look. The supernatural stuff is
ridiculous; people are randomly transported back in time to the horrible heyday
of the asylum, while others just as randomly escape this fate. Since ghosts are
not inhibited by time and space, they can pop up anywhere, but they still insist
on chasing people rather than just popping up in front of them.

It's a shame this is all so shoddily done, because there could have been a
fun movie here. The idea of a treasure hunt in a haunted house—not the
steamy industrial basement of a haunted asylum—holds a lot of
possibilities: different surprises in each room, outlandish clues, conniving
characters, shifting loyalties, and so on.

Two of the extras actually set up the expectation that this is going to be
an adventure/puzzle. "Character Confessionals" gives us all the
players, individually, telling us a bit about themselves and why they are there,
and offers a few clues about the action. "The Search for an Idol: Dr.
Richard Hammer's Quest" is Pacey's character providing some background on
the Baphomet idol. These extras are actually the best and most original part of
the film; the rest is like a dinner-theater adaptation of Saw.

From a technical standpoint, Return to House on Haunted Hill looks
and sounds fine. Apparently, a lot of work went into this—enough to
justify a mind-blowing six minutes of end credits. But if you actually sit
through these, you get a "clever" two-minute set up for a sequel! If
you didn't see that coming (and the only reason I let the credits run was
because I figured it had to be there), then you haven't seen enough derivative
direct-to-video unscary predictable and boringly violent horror movies.